Imperial Requiem: Four Royal Women and the Fall of the Age of Empires

by Justin C. Vovk

  The scale of the coronation was extraordinary. “A gang of princes” came from all over Europe, but in keeping with court tradition no reigning monarchs were invited so that no one with equal rank to the tsar would be in attendance.341 Seven thousand invited guests flocked into Moscow. Almost a million more stood in the streets to watch the procession. To run smoothly, the event required no less than “1300 full time servants and 1200 part time. The livery division required 600 horses and 800 coachmen with horses and carriages. Guards came from 83 battalions, 47 squadrons and hundreds of batteries.”342

  Nicholas was the first to be crowned on May 26, 1896, in what would turn out to be a five-hour ceremony at the Cathedral of the Assumption. After receiving the diamond-and-ruby crown that had first been worn by Catherine the Great, Nicholas II’s grand titles were announced by the deacon: “Nicholas Alexandrovich, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar of Moscow, Kiev, Vladimir, Novgorod.” The list went on to include all the provinces, territories, and fiefs over which the tsars claimed lordship: “Poland, Finland, Bulgaria, Tver…Semigalia, Samogotia, Armenia and the Mountain Princes.”343 After Nicholas’s crowning and proclamation, it was his wife’s turn. When the moment came, Alexandra acquitted herself well, though her nerves were certainly tested. For most of the long ceremony, the tsar and tsarina sat on their thrones, staring out into the crowds, their faces motionless and without expression. One witness drew a sharp contrast between the tsar and his wife. While Nicholas looked overwhelmed by his imperial mantle, Alexandra, “stood steadily upright, her crown did not appear to crush her.… [but] even at this supreme hour no joy seemed to uplift her, not even pride; aloof enigmatic, she was all dignity but she shed about her no warmth. It was almost a relief to tear one’s gaze from her.”344 The dowager empress also wrote about the coronation, telling her mother “how gripping and solemn it all was! My heart truly bled to see my Nicky at this, so young, in his beloved father’s place.”345 That night, as the tsar and his wife stepped out onto the balcony of the mighty Kremlin before an excited crowd of thousands, the palace’s facade was illuminated by thousands of tiny bulbs.

  What should have been an otherwise joyous event was marred by disaster. A few days after the coronation, a mob of four hundred thousand people assembled at the Khodynka field to celebrate the tsar and his wife. By the evening, an estimated one million people had converged on the field for the revelry. What started out as a festive atmosphere, with hundreds of thousands drinking from mugs adorned with the imperial crest, soon erupted into bedlam when a rumor circulated that the officials ran out of food and drink. Almost immediately, the masses panicked. Drunk and unruly, they threw off their restraints and went into a frenzy. Men, women, and children were literally trampled to death by the alcohol-induced panic on a field lined with artillery trenches. Vladimir Giliarovsky, a reporter for the Russian Gazette, was at Khodynka that day. His account from several days later is a haunting description of the tragedy. “Steam began to rise,” he recalled, “looking like the mist over a swamp.… Many felt faint, some lost consciousness.” All around him people were “fighting for breath, vomiting, succumbing to the irresistible pushing and jostling. There was no wind, no moon. Only the suffocating congestion, which worsened as dawn approached.” One of the survivors of the massacre recalled what happened next. “A mass of people half a million strong staggered with all its unimaginable weight in the direction of the buffets,” he wrote. “People by the thousands fell in a ditch and ended up literally on their heads at the bottom. Others fell straight after them, and more, and more.…”346 When the dust on the field finally settled, witnesses became ill at the sight of hundreds of lifeless, bloodied corpses. The official death toll was estimated at 1,389, with another 1,300 injured.

  The imperial family was horrified beyond words. “The dreadful accident … was appalling beyond all description, and has … draped a black veil over all the splendor and glory!” Minnie wrote to her mother. “Just imagine how many poor unfortunate people were crushed and fatally injured.”347 In the aftermath, Nicholas and Alexandra rushed to the hospitals to be with the injured. Nicholas paid out of his own pocket for the burial of every person who died at Khodynka. The finger of blame was pointed squarely at the tsar’s uncle Grand Duke Serge, who had been responsible for the preparations that day. It was widely known that Serge neglected to properly prepare the field because he quarreled with another court official over protocol for the event. When the tsar announced he was launching an investigation into the tragedy, Serge browbeat him into calling it off by threatening to boycott the imperial court if he was implicated. “How outrageous can you get!” wrote the tsar’s incredulous cousin Grand Duke Constantine Constantinovich. “If only the Emperor were sterner and stronger!”348

  Neither the tsar nor his wife felt it was appropriate to hold any further coronation festivities, but once again, Nicholas II’s formidable uncles pressured him into submission. They practically forced him and Alexandra to attend a ball held by the French ambassador. It was imperative that the tsar attend, the grand dukes insisted, since the ambassador had spent more than half a million rubles on the ball and Nicholas’s absence could be taken as a snub. France was Russia’s only European ally—the two powers had signed a treaty in 1892. Nicky’s uncles warned him that snubbing the French ambassador would earn bitter recriminations from Paris. Browbeaten, Nicholas agreed to make an appearance at the ball. Many criticized Alexandra for agreeing to attend with her husband, but her heart was broken for the victims and their families. Crown Princess Marie of Romania, one of her cousins who was no fan of the tsarina, wrote years later, “No doubt many that night considered the Empress heartless because she went to a ball on the evening of the great disaster, yet God alone knows how much rather she would have stayed at home to pray for the dead!”349

  The months that followed the coronation were particularly miserable ones for Alexandra. A few weeks before leaving for Moscow, she excitedly told Nicholas she was pregnant again. Early reports from her doctors indicated she was carrying a boy. In an effort to avoid the close scrutiny brought about by her first pregnancy, Alexandra chose to tell only her husband, their immediate family, and a few of her ladies-in-waiting. Sadly for Alexandra, the emotional strain of the coronation and her overwhelming grief from the Khodynka tragedy taxed her body. According to one historian, her “body rebelled,” and she miscarried the baby. “What had begun in joy,” the same historian wrote, “and celebration was ending in a season of disaster, with the crown of the Romanovs tarnished by tragedy and the heir to the throne, the boy whose existence Alix had kept as her secret, lost in a swirl of blood.”350 Her critics used this tragedy as an excuse to heap insults upon the empress. They claimed she had become pregnant by a lover and aborted the fetus to cover up her infidelity—“a malevolent distortion of the reality of her miscarriage.”351

  The emotional turmoil of Alexandra’s failed pregnancy was soothed when she and Nicholas accepted an invitation from Queen Victoria to visit Scotland. It became a major continental tour that included a visit to France and finished with a much-awaited trip to see Alexandra’s brother, Ernie, in Darmstadt. At the beginning of September, Nicholas, Alexandra, and their entourage of several hundred docked in the port town of Leith, a district in northern Edinburgh. The tsar and tsarina were welcomed by the Prince of Wales, their mutual uncle, but they still had much traveling to do before they reached journey’s end. From the dockside at Leith, the royals drove in a downpour to Edinburgh Station, where a train took them more than seventy-four miles west to Ballater. From there, an entire squadron of Scots Greys escorted the group for the eight mile drive to Balmoral in open carriages. When they finally reached the castle, everyone was soaking wet from the pouring rain. Despite the cold, damp climate, the imperial couple received a tenderly warm welcome from the queen. And although she had early reservations about Alexandra’s marrying into the Russian imperial family, Queen Victoria soon became quite fond of Nicholas II. “It feels funn
y to me,” Nicholas wrote to his brother, “the extent to which I have become part of the English [royal] family. I have become almost as indispensable to [the Queen] as her Indians and her Scotsmen; I am, as it were, attached to her and the best thing is that she does not like me to leave her side … She exudes such enormous charm.”352

  The accommodations that had to be set up at Balmoral for the imperial family and their entourage were enormous. Their security detail alone included hundreds of “plainclothes secret servicemen, plus twenty-four constables and four sergeants from the Metropolitan Police.”353 Outside the castle walls, an entire man-made village had to be built to handle the overflow of servants. Even the British royal family was not immune to the hardships imposed by the imperial visit. Accompanying the queen had been the Prince and Princess of Wales, George and May, and numerous other relations. So crowded was Balmoral that the Duke and Duchess of York had to lodge at an inn down the road. Even the castle servants were forced to sleep three or four to a bed.

  For the month of September, Nicholas and Alexandra were swept up in a whirlwind of activities planned by their British relatives. Nicholas went hunting with the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York—a pastime the tsar did not enjoy. He was left feeling even more miserable because of a toothache and a cheek that was “much swollen from irritation at the stump of a decayed molar.”354 Meanwhile, Alexandra spent long hours in the company of her grandmother. Queen Victoria was relieved that, after two years as empress of Russia, Alexandra had not let the position go to her head. She wrote to the Empress Frederick, “Dear Nicky and Alicky are quite unspoilt and unchanged and as dear and simple as ever and as kind as ever. He is looking rather thin and pale and careworn, but sweet Alicky is in great beauty and very blooming. The baby is magnificent, bigger than she and Ella ever were, and a lovely, lively [great-]grandchild;”355 but privately, the queen later admitted that Alexandra’s recent experiences in Russia had made her distant and aloof. Courtiers at Balmoral during the visit could not help but be swept up in the grandeur of the occasion. While attending church one Sunday morning, Lady Lytton observed that it was “very interesting seeing the two pews full of the Royalties and the Emperor and Empress standing by the Queen even in the Scotch [Church] where all is simple and reverent.”356

  The last day of the visit was emotional for Alexandra and Victoria. They passed the rainy, misty day quietly in one of the castle’s salons. When the rain finally broke, Nicholas and Alexandra planted a tree in the garden to commemorate their visit. The queen recorded in her diary, “in the afternoon [we] drove out with them, alas! for the last time.”357 Nicholas and Alexandra’s generosity shone forth in the parting gifts they left for the Balmoral staff. The tsar left a staggering tip of £1,000 for the master of the household to distribute among the staff. To the queen’s physician, Sir James Reid, who cured his toothache, he left a gold cigarette case decorated with the imperial crest studded with diamonds. The empress left a sachet of flawless diamonds and pearl jewelry for the ladies-in-waiting. These gifts, though, were not as lavish as one would think under the circumstances. When the tsar’s ancestor and namesake, Tsar Nicholas I, visited Queen Victoria early in her reign, he left £2,000, a diamond parure worth another thousand, and freely distributed rings, brooches, and other jewels.

  When the time finally came for the Romanovs to depart, Scottish attendants dressed in formal kilts held blazing torches aloft to illuminate the imperial family’s departure into the night. Both the tsar and tsarina—Nicholas in a gray Scottish uniform and Alexandra in a glittering pink dress trimmed with white fur—looked stately and dignified as they said their farewells. “It has been such a very short stay and I leave dear kind Grandmama with a heavy heart,” she wrote shortly before her departure. As if she had some preternatural instinct that she would never see Victoria again, she added, “Who knows when we may meet again and where?”358

  Capping the Russian imperial couple’s tour abroad was the highly anticipated state visit to France, the tsarist empire’s newest ally. When Nicholas and Alexandra drove through the streets of Paris, they were greeted with cheering crowds. French president Félix Faure bestowed a number of gifts on the imperial family. To two-year-old Grand Duchess Olga, he gave a set of accessories that included a tiny comb, brush, and mirror for one of her prized toy dolls. To the tsarina, Faure presented a Gobelin tapestry of Marie Antoinette and her children. This ironic piece of décor, based on the portrait done by Madame Vigée Le Brun, later hung in Alexandra’s drawing room in the Alexander Palace on the grounds of Tsarskoe Selo. Nicholas was well received in Paris, but once again, despite her best efforts, Alexandra was a flop. Painfully self-conscious, she shied away from the people’s thunderous welcome. Her only effort to align herself with France’s republicanism backfired when she refused to meet a group of grande dames with ties to the old monarchy. What she did not realize was that France enjoyed an unusual mixture of republican and royalist elements. There were still many facets of French society connected to the old Bourbon and Bonaparte dynasties. In response to this slight, the French people withdrew their acclamations of Alexandra. The press promptly started criticizing everything about her. Even her accommodations came under scrutiny. She had been staying in Marie Antoinette’s apartments at Versailles, but after this incident, the public declared she was no longer worthy of that honor. For all her failed efforts in France, Alexandra Feodorovna meant well. But fatigued, nauseous, and weak, she had little energy to carry her through the visit. The news of her condition arrived shortly before leaving Balmoral. Alexandra was pregnant again.

  As a young wife and mother, May York’s life centered on a variety of homes. While in London, her family resided at the deceptively named York House. It is actually an entire wing of Saint James’s Palace on Pall Mall, a street in central London between Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Their main residence continued to be York Cottage, at the royal family’s Sandringham estate in the Norfolk countryside. Located six miles away from the port town of King’s Lynn on England’s east coast, York Cottage was a two-story manor house that was originally built as an annex known as the Bachelor’s Cottage for male guests visiting Sandringham. Much as May tried to personalize the place, she never came to see York Cottage as a true home, not in the way she did Kensington Palace or White Lodge. Being located only a few hundred yards from George’s parents’ Grand Manor, it offered the duke and duchess little privacy. During the daytime, there were nearly three dozen servants in the cramped house. May once said it was “so very nice but so small for my needs.”359

  The house had few modern amenities. Bathrooms were in short supply. With the exception of the master bedroom and a few dressing rooms, the rooms contained no indoor plumbing for lavatories. George felt differently than his wife about the house. The subdued, demure Duke of York cherished its remoteness from London. He also liked being close to his parents, especially his mother, whom George and his sisters affectionately called “Motherdear.” What also appealed to George was the fact that Sandringham possessed thirty thousand acres upon which he could indulge his favorite pastime: hunting. George’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, noted that “when he was Duke of York … he did nothing at all but kill [hunt] animals and stick in stamps.”360 Sandringham was so vast that it contained a menagerie of free-roaming animals, including an elephant, a bear, and a miniature Indian pony. For nearly two decades, May’s husband would insist on making Sandringham their family’s true home largely for that reason.

  Life at York Cottage was a far cry from Tsarina Alexandra’s extravagant palaces in Saint Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo, Augusta Victoria’s austere surroundings in Berlin and Potsdam, or even Zita’s homes in Chambord and Tuscany. Regardless of its inconveniences, May still grew attached to her Norfolk home. It was at York Cottage that she gave birth to her second child on December 14, 1895. That afternoon cannons boomed from the Tower of London, and guns were fired in Hyde Park to announce the birth of a son. George recorded in his diary that day
, “A little boy was born weighing 8lb at 3.30 … everything most satisfactory, both doing very well. Sent a great number of telegrams, had something to eat. Went to bed at 6.45 very tired.”361 The Duchess of Teck was thrilled at the arrival of another grandchild. “A Boy!!! What Joy!!!” she squealed with delight to her son Alge.362

  The infant’s date of birth, December 14, was a deeply symbolic one for Queen Victoria. It fell on Mausoleum Day, the thirty-fourth anniversary of the death of her husband, Prince Albert. For Queen Victoria, December 14 was a sacred day, which she looked upon with a strange mix of reverence and apprehension. Her thirty-nine years of mourning for her beloved Albert has since become iconic. Since the day he died, she wore nothing but black and had his clothes laid out each morning as if he were about to walk into the room and start his day. When the queen’s newest great-grandchild was born on the hallowed day of her husband’s death, “the child’s grandfather, the Prince of Wales, announced the news of the birth with a kind of apology.” Queen Victoria was “rather distressed that this happy event should have taken place on a darkly sad anniversary for us.”363 “This terrible anniversary returned for the thirty-fourth time,” she wrote. “When I went into my dressing-room found telegrams saying dear May had been safely delivered of a son at three this morning. Georgie’s first feeling was regret that this dear child should be born on such a sad day. I have a feeling it may be a blessing for the dear Little Boy, and may he be looked upon as a gift from God.”364 In the end, May and George decided the child should be named Albert, in the prince consort’s honor. “I really think it would gratify her if you yourself proposed the name Albert to her,” wrote May’s father-in-law.365 Two days later, the queen received the news that the baby would indeed be named Albert, which she recorded gave her “the greatest pleasure.”366 At the infant’s christening three months later, he was given the names Albert Frederick Arthur George (“Bertie”). In consequence, Queen Victoria gave the child a marble bust of Prince Albert as a gift. The Duchess of Teck, however, did not approve of the child’s first name. She wrote prophetically that she hoped the infant’s last name, George, “may supplant the less favoured one [Albert].”367